General Election

I normally try to write something light-hearted for my blog, but just this once I'm going to stray into politics:

There has been a lot of talk about there being fewer than 100 days until the general election and about whether the younger voters should even bother. My belief is that we should all, to a man, go to the polling station and spoil our ballot papers. Our votes WILL be counted, and there can be no talk of voter-apathy if we get a huge turn out of people, like me, who believe that the best candidates that the political parties have to offer just aren’t good enough.

I have no problem with parliamentary democracy, and I'm proud to live under one. I'd just rather not be governed by one filled almost entirely with self-serving, populist, centrist idiots. Here is a brief round-up of a few of my favourite reasons, since I left college, to believe that the entire political caste is incompetent:

• We've had a government who sold off the radio frequency spectrum (you only get one of those), paid off all the debts, and then announced the end of boom-and-bust economics.
• We've had a government who dismissed their advisor on drugs policy because he had the temerity to suggest examining cost and outcomes of the current policy. The bastard!
• We've had a government who decided that we needed to sell some of our gold and buy foreign currency. They then made such a bad job of it that you can see exactly when it happened on any graph of gold prices, from a long way away, if you squint.
• We've had a government which noticed that the (approx) 10% of school leavers who went to university ended up as the most economically productive members of society and decided that we could make the whole country richer if we sent 50% of people to university. In the process they have destroyed free higher education and de-valued British degrees. It was exactly the same logic which would notice that pregnant people are predominantly women, and then deciding that the way to increase the number of women in the boardroom would be to inseminate 50% of company directors. [note 1]
• Expenses.
• The standard of debate in the house of commons.

Richard "don’t waste your vote – spoil your vote" B

[note 1 If you want to know why it looks so much like going to university raises your wages in later life, it's probably because deciding to go away to university at the end of school used to be a good proxy for being bright and hard-working. In combination those factors have a positive predictive effect on your earning potential.]